How I came to blog

The fire was lit almost two years before it began, back in the dark days.  I started weaning Morgan when she was one, and finished a couple months later.  Since we knew we didn't want more children right away, my practitioner suggested a more effective birth control.  At this time, Lance was working long hours, not getting home until 8 or 10 at night, I had exactly one real friend with kids (and even that was in the developing stages), and though I was investigating Jesus, I hadn't given him the reigns.  So I was alone.

It was in this period, against a grey winter backdrop, that I became angry.  I mean soul searing, put your kid in the bedroom and go outside before you do something you regret angry.  It was as though an outside force had taken possession of my body, and I was powerless to control it.

Mostly, we battled over sleep.  The sleep neither of us were getting.  Hours followed hours of frustrating rocking, but when I would lay her down, she would wake, and scream, and we would begin again. I felt so bone crushingly tired, like I had been scraped out hollow and shriveled up, and left to wither away, in a world where my sole companion's only communication was limited to raspberry blowing.

Lance knew I was struggling, but I don't think I wanted him to see how deep it ran; how bleak my inner landscape had really become.  After all, nothing was wrong.  We had a good relationship and a good life.  I wasn't unhappy with anything, I was just unhappy.

It was this desperation that drove me to google.  "Depressed housewife" I typed, and there she was, "The World's Worst Housewife" (in which our formerly competent heroine struggles with nearly every aspect of child rearing and home making). She was dark, funny, and most of all she said the things I was thinking, all the furtive little secrets motherhood, right there, out loud (figuratively of course.) I was no longer alone.

I checked for new posts every day.  I clung to her words like a bobbing life buoy, adrift in a sea of put together MOPs moms.  After a while though, she started talking about marital trouble, and soon she slipped beneath the waves and quit blogging all together.  Again, I was treading water alone.

In the void where her blog had been, I began to journal, and though I never published those entries, an ember had ignited inside of me that refused to go out.

Finally, Lance said to me, "I know this isn't you.  We need to figure it out, and I think it's your pill." This  was a revelation to me, a small glimmer of possibility that I wasn't just totally unfit for mothering. And sure enough, all over google, validation: story after story of women just like me, on this pill, seething with unidentified rage.

After I stopped taking it, color seeped back into my world.  I started to recognize myself again, but an idea had taken hold in those dark days, a hope that I could one day be that hand in the dark, dragging a gasping mother up for a breath of fresh air when she most needed it.  My blog was born, and on it's best day, that is my hope for it.